The men community started at Reichenbach, but the site was too remote, and in 1887 the community moved to St. Ottilien Abbey in Oberbayern. Women religious have formed part of the Missionary Benedictine enterprise from the beginning, based at first at St. Ottilien but the sisters developed independently and today form the Congregation of Missionary Benedictine Sisters of Tutzing.
Missionary Benedictine Sisters of Tutzing Daegu Priory
On November 21, 1925, four sisters went to Wonsan, North Korea, at the request of Abbot Bishop Bonifatius Sauer, OSB. Wonsan was raised to a priory in 1927.
By the end of WWII they had 4 local houses, clinics and schools. In 1945 the Japanese confiscated the kindergarten and the priory house. Then in May 1949 all the buildings were confiscated and the sisters imprisoned after the communists occupied N. Korea.
In May 1949, under Communist leaders, the Korean mission was destroyed.
The Korean brothers and sisters were scattered, two sisters were killed, and five others are missing. The European missionaries were imprisoned for almost five years in a work camp, hidden in a non-agricultural mountain region where they had to live and work under the harshest conditions. Two German sisters died in the camp. After their release in January 1954, the priests, brothers and sisters were transported across Russia and unexpectedly appeared one day at the Friedland camp on the German border.
Sr. M. Gertrud Link, the prioress at that time, left behind an eloquent testimony from that period in her must read book, My Way With God, published in 1998 by EOS Verlag St. Ottilien.
When the Korean sisters were freed, 13 of them survived and individually sought their way to the South where they gathered in Busan. (4 Korean sisters were either lost or killed by the communists.) In 1950, Bishop Choi DeokHeung of Daegu invited the sisters and donated one part of the Bishop’s property, an old remodeled Japanese house in GongPyeongDong. In the middle of the destruction and misery, the sisters have resided in that place and worked fervently for evangelization in many aspects, such as medical care, catechism, pastoral ministry and social works. At that time, some German sisters returned to South Korea and joined the community in Daegu.
The sisters had received a quite significant number of medicines from NCWC (National Catholic Welfare Council) through the kindness of Bishop of Pyongyang, North Korea, Monsignor George Carroll. They decided to share the front and the biggest room of the house to care the sick and help the poor with the medicines received. In this way, the room gave birth to the so called St. Anthony’s clinic which became later Daegu Fatima Hospital.
In 1956, the community moved to SinAmDong and erected a Priory House with its official Novitiate. On December 9, 1985, they moved to the present location in Sasudong. On November 16, 1987, the sisters were divided into two priories, one in Seoul and one in Daegu.
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